Archive for February 16th, 2008

In some of our previous blogs, we have talked about performance monitor (and tracking it within SQL Server) as well as the ability to co-relate the perfmon data with the SQL Server Profiler data in SQL Server 2005. In this post, we want to mention some additional built in tools in Windows that can be used to automate log data collection and interpretation of that data.

Logman : This tool can be used to schedule the start and stop of the logging process. That can be done using the performance monitor as well as even using the AT scheduler in windows however, one advantag of doing this using Logman is that it enables one to configure data collection and copying that data to different machines from a single location. The link of the utility above points to the technet post that explains the different options available with this tool.

Relog: Relog allows us to re-sample from a performance log and extracting the data out into different formats like txt, csv, SQL (database insert) for better reporting. For loading into the SQL database, all it needs is an ODBC DSN name.

LogParser: This utility is used for analysis of the IIS logfiles. It allows the end users to query the log files. It is also available as part of the Windows Resource Kit or you can download it from the link given above.

PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs): This is a very good tool for interpreting the performance logs and is available on codplex.com. MSFT PSS team has provided a lot of XML templates with recommended threshold values which you can change as per your needs. PAL uses LogParser which has been mentioned above in this post. We would highly recommended downloading this tool and playing with it to see how it can help you in your sysadmin tasks.

TypePerf: Typeperf can be used to write up the performance data to the command window or to a log file.

We have used a variation of these tools with our own scripting scripts for some of our projects at client sites and would highly recommend them. These can be used in troubleshooting issues as well as helping prepare a baseline performance metrics of your environment.